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FREEDOMWAYS                           THIRD QUARTER 1972

within a single play, and far, far fewer have written about Africa. The success with which Lorraine Hansberry managed this task is dazzling-- her vivid and razor-sharp dialogue, for example, her characterizations which are at the same time highly individual and profoundly illustrative, and her clarity of focus within such a complex structure.
But above all, Lorraine Hansberry's vision is so penetrating that we must see ourselves in this play-- whoever and whenever we are. She was not, as some critics of Les Blancs suggested, telling blacks to "kill whitey," nor was she advising whites on negotiating tactics. She was trying to help us understand, simply, that we cannot escape history because in a certain sense we are history, in every decision that we make, and we had better be aware of it. It is rare that we can see our own world and lives with such clarity and truth. Through the work of such an artist, we can bring our existence a bit more within our grasp.   
                                         David E. Ness


DEMOCRACY AT WAR WITH MILITARY

GHANA UNDER MILITARY RULE: 1966-1969. By Robert Pinkney. Menthuen & Co., Ltd., London. Distributed in the U.S. by Harper & Row, New York. 182 pages. $6.75 (cloth); $3.50 (paper). 

IN FEBRUARY 1966, a band of soldiers seized control over the constitutionally established government of Ghana. They deposed Kwame Nkrumah, the legal President of the Republic. They banned the Convention People's Party, Nkrumah's "popularly" based party. They suspended the national parliament and instituted in its place an army/police junta. Ghanaians met the military coup d'etat with a mixture of apathy, indifference and joy. There was no open resistance, at least from the public. The military/police junta ruled for three and a half years. They handed over to a "popularly" elected civilian government in September 1969 only to be deposed by another military/police junta on January 13, 1972. Kwame Nkrumah is dead; the first military government of Ghana is passé. A critical assessment is required.
Robert Pinkney sets out to asses the achievements of the first military government of Ghana. In so doing, Pinkney overexaggerates

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BOOK REVIEW                                      ANKOMAH

Ghana's problems under Nkrumah; he debases Nkrumah's achievements and he magnifies, beyond the limits of truth, the achievements of Ghana's first military government. 
Ghana's first military government started with the illusion that Westminster-type democracy, with all its paraphernalia, was a desirable model for developing Ghana. The flaws in such thinking are many, They made little effort to build the infrastructure necessary for realizing such a model. The actions of the first military government, however, negated their flaunting verbal intentions to institute the Westminster model in Ghana. They dismissed the editors of government newspapers who criticized certain government measures. They had a Protective Custody Decree that "was the ultimate weapon for dealing with those whose words or actions the Government disliked." They selected a Constituent Assembly to draft a constitution and did not give the average Ghanaian a say in the constitution. The average citizen was not represented by the Constituent Assembly. Powerful interest groups, reflecting the oligarchical orientation of the military/police junta, were well represented. The democratic facade, as opposed to the authoritarian reality, is testified to by the rejection of a troika Presidential Commission by the Constituent Assembly and the return of the proposed constitutional proposal to the Assembly for reconsideration, a condition that makes their democratic claims rather perfidious. The military/police junta, in line with their oligarchic democracy, barred certain groups from participating in the next civilian government by disqualifying them and offering them no right to appeal for exemption. As Pinkney ironically puts it: "...the notion of prescribing universally applicable rules to decide who should be disqualified was now replaced by a cruder approach of 'I don't think you are fit to hold office; therefore I won't let you.'" (p. 131) It does sound like an order, yet the police/military junta saw to it that such an order, denying Ghanaians the choice of electing whomever they preferred, was written into the new constitution of the Second Republic. This clause was applied against the leader of the opposition party who was elected overwhelmingly by his constituents. The illusion of the Westminster model for Ghana provided a facade for the efforts of the military cum police junta, who, making sure that certain people were barred from taking office, at the same time made considerable efforts to cement a base for giving the powers of government to Nkrumah's opponents. They included Dr. Busia and his cohorts in a number of committees and commissions. Dr. Busia was appointed Chairman of the Center for
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